TX reredistricting illegal

in our latest we should be shocked but somehow we aren't segment, internal DOJ staffers disgruntled with the blatantly partisan hacks above them leaked their memo to the Washington Post.

It was the unnanimous conclusion of the DOJ staff attorney's in the election law section that Tom "indicted" DeLay's power grab violated the law...yet higher ups overrulled them. It even forced these people to sign gag orders to prevent them from talking about it.

All this comes in the wake of the Supreme Court stalling on its announcement of what to do about the TX redistricting case before it. While juries aren't supposed to read newspapers to arrive at their decisions, I sure hope the court's law clerks and justices are. And I hope it turns at least one hard heart around. The last time a redistricting case like this was heard
Vieth v. Jubelirer [caution, PDF of lengthy opinion] on the Penn. redistricting that was almost as egregious, the court said partisan redistricting is ok by a 5-4 vote. Maybe CJ Roberts will have too much respect for the law and these staff attorneys to look the other way, but it is pretty unlikely alas.

However, one could argue that the two cases are different. Here is not just partisanship for the sake of gaining seats, but at the expense of minorities. Texas went from 30 to 32 seats, but there remained only 11 minorities in their delegation. Moreover, the representation lost 5 democrats in 2004, who supported minorities' interests, even if the representatives are themselves white.

This case needs to say that it was the wrong thing to do on minority rights grounds AND that reredistricting itself is illegal. Otherwise, every time a state legislature changes political hands, parties will be tempted to reredistrict mid-decade, using increasingly inaccurate census data. For example, millions more people live in Texas in 2003 (especially Hispanics) when the reredistricting occured than when the 2000 census was conducted. By relying on old data, you effectily disinfrancizing and weighting some votes more heavily than others. This violates the 1 person, 1 vote holding of Reynolds (which incidently ScAlito seems to want to overturn) set out by the Warren court.